In The Poetry

The following poem is dedicated to a whole generation of women – that would have been my grandmother’s generation – who did hand-painting on china and many of us in my generation have their hand-painted china in our china cupboards that we get out on special occasions and so on. And I’ve always been fascinated [...]

This poem which is sort of grim at the end is an attempt to describe a kind of day very early in spring when we’re hopeful spring is coming but it darkens down and gets cold and damp at the end which is very much the way the poem happens.

Late February

The first warm day,
and [...]

The following is about my grandmother, Moser, my mother’s mother who had a set of pink depression glass dishes and its pretty well described in the poem my feelings about these – that glass dishes don’t keep hot fluids hot and so on, but it’s also a poem about the kind of poverty those people [...]

This poem addresses something that I think about a great deal which is simply that we are another kind of animal and that we’re blessed with a superior intelligence but can’t divorce ourselves from all the other creatures.

Walking on Tiptoe

Long ago we quit lifting our heels
like the others – horse, dog, and tiger – [...]

I have a building on which I write which is down by a small pond that we own and I go down there and sit early in the morning and look out across this little pond. And the following poem comes out of one of those mornings – very quiet observations of the pond.

A Letter [...]

A lot of what writing poetry is about is about paying attention. And this poem comes out of me being in the bathroom and noticing a spider in the bathtub in a little tangle of hair and then sort of expanding on that and trying to draw some meaning from it.

An Epiphany

I have seen the [...]

This poem describes something that many of us have seen along the side of roads – abandoned amusement parks, entertainment centres and so on. Nebraska has some of these, Eastern Colorado is full of them.

The Giant Slide

Beside the highway, the Giant Slide
with its rusty undulations lifts
out of the weeds. It hasn’t been [...]

Almost thirty years ago I was talking to the Nebraska poet William Kloefkorn on the street one day and he asked me if I’d been invited to read poems at an event out on Grand Island, Nebraska, and I said no I hadn’t heard about it at all and I was generally sort of angered [...]

I am a devotee of thrift shops and goodwill stores and garage sales and yard sales and so on, and have spent hours and hours in these places – I just love them, I can’t exactly say why. But the following poem describes the basement of a goodwill store in the way I’ve seen them [...]

My grandmother, Mosure, my mother’s mother lived all of her life in Clayton County, Iowa. And when I was a little boy I spent weeks there in the summer. And this is a description of my grandmother’s kitchen as I saw it years after she had gone.

A Room in the Past

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains [...]